Monday, May 9, 2016

THE ASHAKIRAN TAPE – Jürgen Fauth

Back
when you were so much older, as the saying goes, and that
wild-haired, skinny troubadour taunted you in his nasty, nasal,
tone-deaf voice that you didn't know what was happening did you, it
annoyed you a tad, didn't it? You laugh, of course, now that you are
younger and able to accept there are many things you don't know and
never will and don't give a big cahoot about knowing. Many things.

There
are things, though, that you do give a big cahoot about knowing. One
of these is the singular recording everyone seems to be looking for,
that some would pay big money for, kill for. The things you want to
know are, regarding the tape, what is on it and where it is. But
this, the tape, really is only of secondary size among your cahoots,
at first. The big one at first is how to get back your stolen Phish
concert tickets. You eventually discover a connection, between the
tickets and the tape, and once this revelation comes to you, the tape
immediately ascends as the subject of your biggest cahoot.

At
this point, were this an earlier day and you a sly, dangerous,
knockout dame, you'd hire a tough private eye—say, Sam Spade—to
find the dingus--the tape—and get your tickets back to boot, before
you bumped him off. But this is not an earlier day. It's right now,
and you're not any kind of dame. You're Quentin Pfeiffer, aging Dead
Head/former Phish Follower/married-soon-to-become-father trying
cautiously to pass the rocker torch to his wife's guileless niece and
her callow boyfriend by taking them to a Phish reunion concert at
Long Island's Jones Beach. This is where things go haywire in a
strobing progression so incrementally ominous that if you were not
already enjoying a half-decent karmic equilibrium you might feel a
need to start calling yourself “Dude.”

Pfeiffer
abides without such accouterments, although for our (and the
typesetter's) benefit The
Ashakiran Tape'snarrator
calls him simply “Q.” The sly, dangerous, knockout dame in this
adventure calls herself Ashakiran, “Goddess of Peace, but you can
call me Ash.” She introduces herself thusly to Q and the two
youngsters after they rescue her from a tall, lanky “sketchball”
who pulls a knife as she tries to fight him off over some sort of
bag at the impromptu pre-show hippie bazaar on Shakedown Street
outside the concert venue. Are you beginning to feel the bern...I
mean buzz? Things are not always as they seem, in life, of course,
and especially on Shakedown Street when Phish is playing.

Jürgen Fauth

Here's
what we are permitted to see as Q and his wards meet the damsel
they'd saved from the beast when she comes to thank them after the
sketchball dashes away into the crowd, eluding the concert security
foot patrol: “You
were a-mazing,” a husky voice said from behind. They weren’t
alone. The dreadlocked girl had somehow managed to follow them. “All
of you, just amazing!” she said, her voice raspy from, Q guessed,
years of heavy smoking, and not just weed. “I don’t even know how
to thank you!”

Q
looked her over and saw that she wasn’t nearly as young as he’d
initially thought. Something about her clothes and the coiled
strength on display when she was fighting with the lanky guy had made
him misjudge her age, but her face revealed the truth, weathered and
furrowed by, he imagined, hard living and some less than savory
adventures on the road. Her eyes could’ve belonged to a much
younger woman though, as if, over the years, a tough shell had slowly
grown around something tender. It was a face like a coral reef.

Hardly
“Miss Wonderly” of Spadeville. Maybe more like “Maude” of
Lebowskiland. Better yet, a Suzy Creamcheesy amalgam of the two. And
there's the fat arch-villain, “Greg,” obsessed with getting the
tape he'd promised to name after Ashakiran when she promised to steal
it for him. A fat and pompous villain as single-minded as Kasper
Gutman seeking the bird “that dreams are made of,” or Lebowski
his vacuous, porn-queen, fake-abducted wife.

And
there's a murder. And it has to do with the Ashakiran tape, reputedly
of a private jam session Phish had with Jerry Garcia. Listen in:

“You’re
telling me this tape you’re after is Phish playing with Garcia?...I
don’t believe a word. Why have I never heard about this?”

Greg
shrugged. “I was at the Shoreline shows, and I saw Trey and Page
there myself. There were always rumors. But Garcia wouldn’t make a
big deal about it, and the guys in Phish probably thought it would
sound like bragging, and bragging of the wrong kind. ‘Ooh, we got
to jam with Jerry!’ They wanted to be their own thing, not Grateful
Dead junior. So nobody ever talked about it.”

“And
there’s a tape of this?”

“I’ve
been looking for it ever since I first heard about it, fifteen years
ago...”

The
stuff of acid-spun dreams, greed-glory, mystery, murder most foul,
and innocence ravaged and somewhat salvaged.

The
Ashakiran Tape is
subtitled Head Cases Vol.1. Would there be others. Would that be far
far out.

Thanks for reading, Tracy. The Ashakiran Tape is indeed a sort of cult novel appealing to the fans of a couple of cult bands--The Grateful Dead and its somewhat successor, Phish--I was a longtime GD fan, but I never made the leap to Phish. In fact I don't believe I've ever even heard them (something I could right now on YouTube, of course, and just might). The other insider references besides little winks at Bob Dylan and The Staple Singers (who gave us the word "cahoot" in a rock context) are Hammett's classic, The Maltese Falcon, which I know you recognized, and the Coen Brothers' film The Big Lebowski, which was inspired in part by The Big Sleep. Come to think if it, you just might enjoy The Ashakiran Tape for those two reasons alone.